> I'd rather have a weaker model which I can always rely on being available than a strong model which is hosted by a third party service that can be shut down at any time.
Every LLM project I’ve worked with has an abstraction layer for calling hosted LLMs. It’s trivial to implement another adapter to call a different LLM. It’s often does as a fallback, failover strategy.
There are also services that will merge different providers into a unified API call if you don’t want to handle the complexity on the client.
Suppose you live outside of America and the supermajority of LLM companies are American. You want to ask a question about whisky distillation or abortion or anything else that's legal in your jurisdiction but not in the US, but the LLM won't answer.
You've got a plethora of cloud providers, all of them aligned to a foreign country's laws and customs.
If you can choose between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and some others... well, that's really not a choice at all. They're all in California. What good does that do an Austrian or an Australian?
Every LLM project I’ve worked with has an abstraction layer for calling hosted LLMs. It’s trivial to implement another adapter to call a different LLM. It’s often does as a fallback, failover strategy.
There are also services that will merge different providers into a unified API call if you don’t want to handle the complexity on the client.
It’s really not a problem.